Aren't Optical Disks Done? Maybe Not.

   I'm soon to build another machine, and so I am thinking about the necessity for an optical drive. It is a decision I have to make soon. Optical drive, or no.
    Certainly I don't need a floppy drive, (although ebay has tons of external and internal floppy drives cheap), I got all my stuff off of floppies in the nineties. They had so little space (even the 1.44MB ones), that you couldn't put an album on one. I haven't had to consider that for many builds. (So sorry for those of you who find a shoe box of floppies with things that you don't know if you need.)
    A cdrom, though, can hold an album. A dvd drive can hold a movie. Nothing smaller can serve those purposes. I don't know if you remember, but they have evolved as well. They went one side, two side, single layer, double layer until they became pretty much perfect for their use. They can hold any conceivable movie or album.
    Certainly a USB thumb drive can hold either and more, but it has one big drawback. It isn't flat. It has to be at least as thick as an USB connector and be long enough to let you grab it to plug it in or pull it out. I have some that are that minimum size physically, (see the picture above), and are 32GB. They didn't cost much, but already they have already gone the way of the dodo. You can buy larger ones (in storage capacity), for less than they originally cost.
    I suppose that a ukulele tutorial book could come with a blister on the front with a usb drive in it, and maybe that will be what will happen. It hasn't happened yet, but it might, clearly. Any modern machine can read a usb thumb drive. It is a good standard for something like this. Even if you have a modern machine that disdains USB 2.0 or 1.0 in favour of USB 3.0 or 3.1, they are backward compatible. You can plug those old and small and slow ones in, and they will work.
    It is, clearly though, a poorer solution in the sense that it can't be as flat as the magazine or book. It has to be at least as thick as a USB connector to plug in. That means that publishers can't fit as many books in a box. Shipping will cost more.You might not want to ship it in a magazine or a tutorial book, especially not in a beginner's book that is way thinner than a USB drive.
    I suppose that just like OSes today, things might start shipping on thumb drives, (you can get Windows 10 on a thumb drive), and of course I love getting free thumb drives as long as they aren't too small. Right now, I tend to buy 64GB and up thumb drives, they don't cost much, but soon they too will be to small a capacity to sell.
    If you gave me a thumb drive that would just barely hold an album -- I would just throw it away. I would feel bad about the waste, and of the harm to the environment, but what would I do with it? It is obsolete already. I have plenty of thumb drives that are way bigger than that that either cost me very little money or were in fact free (thank you marketing folks), to serve all of my needs. 
    I use everything. I am an uber-geek. I was and am using everything before most people have it on their radar -- all the way back to the internet way before the web, but I still don't see what can replace an optical disk. Clearly there is a need for something that is high capacity and flat, but there is nothing that has been settled on.
    There are things, multiple things that fit our criteria, things that have large capacity and are flat. I am talking about things like memory cards, SD cards. (SD stands for Secure Data which was originally about encrypting music -- Hmmm.) Nowadays they are mostly used in cameras and phones. Recently, they are being replaced by SDHC and SDXC cards with more storage available on them. Bigger. Better. They use the same technology as is used in a thumb drive, (or a flash drive), i.e. memory that can be read and written, but they come in a flatter package.
    Right now, most computers do not have readers for them, although more, (most?), laptops do. The problem is that there is no recognized single standard. An external or internal card reader feels that they have to support CF I/II/MD, Micro SD, SD/SDHC/SDXC/MMC/RSMMC, MS/MS PRO/MS PRO DUO, M2(MS MICRO). To make it even more complicated, many of these come in the original, the mini, and in micro sizes. Whew! Your phone almost certainly uses some size of them. But seriously, can't we just pick one that is tiny and holds terabytes? (SDXC supports up to 2TB, SDHC 32GB, and SD 4GB.)
    What if your guitar or piano instructional book came with a memory card that your hardware didn't support, one that was just newer than your computer could understand? Suppose that you didn't have a card reader at all? They aren't ubiquitous. There is, yet, no clear winner. Even on cameras or phones (where these things are king), many times there are more than one slot because they admit that people want to use more than one thing. It hasn't settled out. That's the problem. There is no one winner.
    As an example, a camera I would love to have, the Canon EOS-1d Mark IV (you can buy it for me if you are rich please), says that it supports: CF Card Type I and II and SD/SDHC Memory Card (1 slot each). Those are completely different and incompatible beasts (hence needing different slots). A SDXC card won't even work although wouldn't you wish for 2TB of storage on your camera?
    So to wrap it up, I will just say that this is a problem that has not been solved in any way that is workable for a joe q citizen like me. There is still nothing that is as ubiquitous as an optical drive to distribute media on. I hope for it, and I will adopt it before you will most likely, but it doesn't exist today. People are still distributing things I want on optical disks. Clearly I still need an optical reader on my next build (and a crazy multiple card reader).
    Edit: my final build that I'm typing this on now is:

1x Corsair 450D Mid tower E-ATX, ATX, mini-ATx and micro-ATX $119-$129
1x i7-6700K CPU
1x ASRock Z170 OC Formula LGA 1151 Motherboard
1x G.SKILL TridentZ Series 64GB (4 x 16GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3200
    (PC4 25600) Desktop Memory Model F4-3200C14Q-64GTZ
1x SeaSonic Snow Silent-1050 1050W ATX12V / EPS12V
    80 PLUS PLATINUM Certified Full Modular Active PFC Power Supply
1x ZOTAC GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB AMP! Extreme graphics card
3x SAMSUNG 950 PRO M.2 SSD
    512GB PCI-Express 3.0 x4 Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-V5P512BW
3x Western Digital RE WD6001FXYZ HDD
    6TB 7200 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Datacenter Capacity HDD
1x Microsoft Windows 10 Pro - Full Version (32 & 64-bit) / USB Flash Drive
1x NZXT Kraken X61 RL-KRX61-01
    280mm All-In-One Water / Liquid CPU Cooling Solution
1x LG Black Blu-ray Burner SATA WH16NS40 - OEM with an external usb case
1x Akasa AK-HC-07BK Card Reader
    4 USB 3.0 + 2xUSB charging (no data)
    Smart Card (bank cards, access cards, based on ISO7816 implementation)
    Compact Flash (CF I, CF II, Ultra, Extreme, I-Pro, Ultimate, MD)
    Memory Stick (MS Pro, MS Pro Duo, Magic Gate, Extreme, Ultra)
    Secure Digital (SDXC, SDHC, SD, Ultra, Extreme, Elite Pro, High Speed,
                    MMC, MMC Mobile)
    • 128GByte for SDXC • 32GByte for SDHC
    M2 (Memory Stick Micro M2)
    microSD (microSDHC, micro SDXC, High Capacity)
1x Dell 27 UltraHD 4K Monitor - P2715Q
1x Corsair K95 RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard with CHERRY MX Brown Switches
1x Logitech G900 RF Wireless/Wired optical mouse with free spin wheel
1x BOSE Companion 2 Series III Multimedia Speaker System
1x HyperX Cloud II Gaming Headset with 7.1 Virtual Surround Sound
    for PC/PS4/Mac/Mobile - Red
1x Wacom Intuos Pro PTH651 8.8" x 5.5" Active Area USB Pen and Touch Medium

1x Epson SureColor P600 printer

Failed To Thrive

    Let me be clear right from the beginning. I am broken. As a child I had no one tell me that they loved me ever. I was not held, ever. My psychiatrist tells me that the only reason my emo self didn't fade away from Failed To Thrive syndrome might be that my big brother Michael was across the room wishing that he might pick me up when I lay in the crib offending the world by crying.
    As I grew, long before I could speak I suffered abuse, spanked and shaken for dirtying my diapers or for daring to cry in despair and need.
    I was an emo kid with terrible attention deficit issues, yet I never showed that because I expected to die. I believed that I had no right to impose on anyone my needs, my expectations, my beliefs. I knew I did not get to have any of those. I didn't even dare to have any of those. I didn't believe I deserved to. I expected that any sign that I was less than a silent perfect boy would be met with a whipping with a leather strap (a belt) until I didn't know if I would survive. Usually, it would just go to welts all over my bare bottom and my back and my legs. Sometimes, though, I would bleed. To this day, the sound of a belt coming out of belt loops destroys me. I can't in any way support my belief in my right to exist if I hear that sound or see the belt being pulled. Part of the damage came from the abuse, but more came from the training to submit. I was taught that a good boy would take his punishment without crying, without putting his hands back to block the belt, without believing that he had any right to exist in a world without abuse. I was taught that it was me -- my fault -- my shame. I was taught a learned helplessness. I was taught to be victim and that it was never ok for me to have any opinion or control or existence in my own life.
    I would be frozen, for example in church, with my hands perfectly folded as the nuns taught us and in such ADHD torment that every moment was terror, yet I did not show it. I was beat into submission. I was, (and am), frozen into a cringe, and I knew better than to ever show that I was less than the quiet perfect submissive child. I never believed in any of that perfection though. I believed myself horrible and deserving of torture. I believed that my job in the family was to hide the shame of the truth of my existence so that my family would not be shamed. I carried the shame for the family, and I always knew that the shame was mine.
    Needless to say, I never bonded with my parents. Even with siblings, it is hard to bond when you are just trying to survive and when expressing concern for the abuse of a sibling might threaten your life. I do not know how my brother did it. I will not speak about his concerns and his damage, but you can see it to this day. If there was any saving grace it was that for us, there was something, some care, some desire for the abuse to not happen. Thank you Michael. I hope that if I were the older my care would have been some shelter for you.
    So that brings me to today. In spite of 45 years of mindfulness practice, (since I was 15), in spite of metta, in spite of my finally found ability to feel a deep compassion for myself, I have never shaken that foundational view that I am bad -- flawed -- horrible -- disgusting. I hate myself for being so horrible that my father had to suffer by beating me. I don't say that that makes sense, I say that all of my understanding of the universe, all of my language was built above that truth. It is what I am. I never expect anyone to tolerate me. I never expect anyone to tolerate my presence. I don't mean that this is what I think. I mean that I knew this as a foundational part of my world-view before I could think. My psychiatrist does not believe that self hatred will ever leave me because before I was able to even speak, I was taught that it was harder for my father to suffer through beating me that it was for me to be beat. I was taught that I was so horrible that my father must suffer in a futile attempt to try to rein me in. She tells me that I will never be the person that was not abused. I can ameliorate but not cure. Sigh.
    You may be one of those people that sees broken people doing broken things and thinking, why don't they just stop doing the broken things, and start doing the healthy thing.  That shows a basic misunderstanding of abuse. We have been taught that nothing we want or believe matters. Any attempt to assert that they do would have been met with excessive punishment. We learn early that we do not control anything, that we are not in charge, and any attempt, however minuscule to assert this will be met with violence. We learn that we have no power even over our own beliefs and actions. We have a learned sense of helplessness. Believe me, that lesson sticks. So fast forward to supposed adulthood and we decide not to do things and find our selves doing them and we do not know why because we do not understand our own victimization. This leads to drug and alcohol abuse and to the abuse of others because however horrified we find ourselves unable to stop, unable to stop seeking anything that looks like love. It can be pretty horrible.
    So. That brings me to the reason for this post. After a lifetime of damaging others and dealing with the consequences and healing and growing, I still don't believe in myself, but others do. I am fundamentally unable to understand why they do, but they do. I step forward in life by faith, never believing in my ability to do good, but acting as if I do based on the faith of others. There is a coffee shop I go to, Philz, where all of the baristas love me. Someone told me today that it was because I have a heart of gold. It made me cry. Right in the coffee shop. I don't understand why they believe in me, but I know that they do. For years, in penance for all of the harm I have done I have been stepping forward in love and compassion, trying to listen to everyone, no matter how broken because I believe that's important. I believe that if I just keep doing the next right thing it will make a difference.
    I have, years since, sworn a vow of compassion for all beings. It is pretty hard sometimes. I don't like some people. Some of them scare me. But I am able to find compassion for them by imaging how their lives brought them to this place. For myself it is harder. I can do it sometimes, but I haven't found the ability to give myself the  slack I give others. I know the people that I love that I have harmed. I do not believe in my innate goodness, yet sometimes, with effort, I can find compassion for my broken self.